The Trouble With Tigers: The Rise and Fall of South-East Asia. Victor Mallet
But the up-and-coming generation of Asian politicians brought up after independence lack their elders’ obsession with colonialism. They believe they have more freedom to pursue policies on their merits – regardless of the provenance of those policies. Many of the views expressed by Anwar Ibrahim, Mahathir’s former deputy, would be endorsed by those who pour scorn on ‘Asian values’ as defined by south-east Asian governments. In the preface to his book The Asian Renaissance – a collection of his speeches and articles – Anwar says he detects a resurgence of art and science as well as an economic revival. But he rejects ‘cultural jingoism’ whether from the West or the East. ‘Asians too, in their xenophobic obsession to denounce certain Western ideas as alien, may end up denouncing their own fundamental values and ideals. This is because in the realm of ideas founded upon the humanistic tradition, neither the East nor the West can lay exclusive claim to them.’ He goes on:
If the term Asian values is not to ring hollow, Asians must be prepared to champion ideals which are universal. It is altogether shameful, if ingenious, to cite Asian values as an excuse for autocratic practices and denial of basic rights and civil liberties. To say that freedom is Western or unAsian is to offend our own traditions as well as our forefathers who gave their lives in the struggle against tyranny and injustice. It is true that Asians lay great emphasis on order and societal stability. But it is certainly wrong to regard society as a kind of deity upon whose altar the individual must constantly be sacrificed. No Asian tradition can be cited to support the proposition that in Asia, the individual must melt into a faceless community.54
Anwar is a living example of how quickly south-east Asian societies are changing. In his youth, he was regarded as an Islamic firebrand and was detained without trial by the government after leading a demonstration. By the time of the financial crisis in 1997, Anwar – as deputy prime minister and finance minister – was the government figure who reassured foreign investors and sought to limit the damage done by Mahathir’s anti-foreign outbursts and threats of exchange controls. His supporters express disgust at the abuse of the term ‘Asian values’ to justify corrupt connections between politicians and businessmen, and draw explicit contrasts between Anwar’s contemporaries and the older generation of south-east Asian leaders. ‘We reached maturity after independence,’ says Abdul Rahman Adnan, director of the Institut Kajian Dasar (Institute for Policy Research), a think-tank in Kuala Lumpur which pushes forward Anwar’s agenda. ‘Everything was already Malaysian. You can’t really blame the nasty colonial power for all the ills of society.’ Adnan and others like him believe that Malaysians are now sufficiently educated to be allowed a more energetic and independent press and more say in how their country is run. ‘They expect the government to be more accountable,’ he says.55
Admiration for Anwar is not confined to Malaysia. ‘He represents what the generation of my age would like to see as the new set of values for the future … Anwar Ibrahim does not fit into the stereotypes of Asean today because of the generation gap,’ says Adi Sasono, secretary general of the Moslem Intellectuals Society of Indonesia. (Known by its Indonesian initials ICMI, the society is an Indonesian government sponsored think-tank which is attempting, like Anwar, to reconcile Islam with the needs of a modern, high-technology society.) Nowhere was the need for a generational leadership change more acutely felt than Indonesia, where the seventy-six-year-old Suharto had ruled for three decades and left his people guessing about who would succeed him. ‘The main political factor in this country is Suharto,’ said Sasono shortly before Suharto’s overthrow. ‘He represents the old value of power, authority. Well, the society is changing rapidly, so after Suharto the political situation will change quite radically.’56
The imminent handover of power from one generation to another at the top of south-east Asia’s governments, along with the continued growth of the middle class, will have profound implications in every country in the region. It is true that the young idealists waiting in the wings are bound to have their enthusiasm blunted by the realities of government. As one eminent proponent of Asian values said of Anwar: ‘His book is a collection of motherhood statements that no one can disagree with … You’ve got to judge a man by his deeds, so you wait and see. I would expect that when he takes over he will govern Malaysia as Dr Mahathir does.’57 But official attitudes to politics, social norms, business practices and environmental policies are likely to change, as popular attitudes already have. The results – albeit with many stops and starts – will be a gradual loosening of central government control over politics and the media, a slow unravelling of the webs of corrupt connections between politicians and businessmen, and the imposition of stricter environmental controls. To this one could add a more relaxed official approach to personal and social matters such as leisure, homosexuality and pre-marital sex, although in Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei liberalization could be delayed or even temporarily reversed by the strong Islamic lobby. The probable effect – already visible in some cities such as Jakarta – would be an increase in the number of people living double lives. As in the Gulf states, many wealthier Moslems would publicly obey the strict religious tenets decreed by the authorities while privately drinking alcohol and visiting prostitutes when abroad.
‘Asian values’, meanwhile, are likely to fade from view. Several years ago, a group of south-east Asian academics, bankers and former ministers produced a document called Towards a New Asia; it advocated democracy within the rule of law and, while paying tribute to the importance of economic growth, suggested that Asia should ‘move to higher ground’ and ‘become a greater contributor to the advancement of human civilization’.58 These sentiments reflect one of the great ironies of the debate: south-east Asia’s leaders are often attacked by their fiercest critics not for being too ‘Asian’ but for importing the worst aspects of western societies – consumerism, materialism, pollution – and labelling them ‘Asian values’. As one Malaysian artist said of Mahathir: ‘Everything he’s doing is western – the assembling of cars, privatization, the “multimedia corridor”, everything. This drive for market-driven development is a very western concept.’59 Sondhi Limthongkul, a Thai businessman who tried to build an Asian media empire, is equally scathing. ‘The problem of most emerging nations in Asia-Pacific is always the absolute worship of economic growth rather than the quality of life,’ he told a conference in Hawaii. ‘It’s very unfortunate that we have learned and inherited so well from the West.’60
If they are interested in formulating any ‘Asian values’ at all, southeast Asia’s next generation of leaders will want to do so by injecting ideas they see as genuinely Asian into a body of beliefs they accept as universal and which seem inevitably to permeate any society that has undergone an industrial revolution. ‘The Asian world and Asian civilization cited so often of late have their origins not deep in the past but in modernization this century in an Asia in contact with the West,’ wrote playwright and professor Masakazu Yamazaki. Modernization, he said, had affected the entire fabric of Asian societies, leading to the rise of industry, the formation of nation states under legitimate institutions and the secularization of ethics and mores. ‘Members of the Association of South East Asian Nations have nearly reached consensus on such fundamentals as the separation of politics from religion, one-man – one-vote representation, and public trial. When it comes to social welfare, women’s liberation, freedom of conscience, access to modern healthcare, and other social policies, almost all the countries of the region now speak the same language as the West.’61 Kim Dae-jung, the Korean politician who has fiercely opposed ‘Asian values’ and the suggestion that Asians are by nature undemocratic, once noted that ‘moral breakdown is attributable not to inherent shortcomings of Western cultures but those of industrial societies; a similar phenomenon is now spreading through Asia’s newly industrializing societies’.62 A dissident who spent his life opposing authoritarian rule